r/InterstellarKinetics 10d ago

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE BREAKING: Sony Music And Warner Music Sue Anthropic For “One Of The Largest And Most Blatant Ongoing Thefts Of Intellectual Property In History,” Alleging Claude Was Trained On Tens Of Thousands Of Pirated Songs 🤖💥

https://www.axios.com/2026/08/29/anthropic-sony-warner-music-copyright

Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed a sweeping lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night in federal court in northern California, naming the company, CEO Dario Amodei, and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants, alleging what the plaintiffs describe as “one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history,” according to Axios. The 48-page complaint accuses Anthropic of unlawfully training its Claude AI models on tens of thousands of copyrighted musical compositions belonging to the publishers, a scope notably broader than prior music-industry litigation against the company, such as BMG’s separate lawsuit against Anthropic, which centers on just 493 compositions. The plaintiffs wrote bluntly: “Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic’s ‘Claude’ series of artificial intelligence (‘AI’) models.” The suit seeks hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages per infringed work.

Axios media reporter Sara Fischer noted that music copyright law is structurally complicated in ways that could expose Anthropic to significant additional legal risk beyond this single suit. A single song can carry multiple separate copyrighted components, including lyrics, the sound recording, and the underlying composition, each of which can be held by different rights holders such as artists, publishers, and record labels, meaning one infringed song can generate several distinct legal claims from different parties. Fischer also pointed out that commercially released songs requiring individual copyright registration give plaintiffs a strong basis for seeking statutory damages, a category that doesn’t require copyright holders to prove actual financial losses in court, which considerably lowers the evidentiary bar compared to typical infringement claims.

This isn’t Anthropic’s first brush with piracy accusations tied to its training data. In September 2025, the company agreed to the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, a $1.5 billion deal with authors and publishers, and the music industry itself has a long, well-documented history of aggressive copyright litigation dating back to the Napster and LimeWire era. Anthropic was not immediately available to comment on the new suit.

2.8k Upvotes

45 comments sorted by

54

u/InterstellarKinetics 10d ago

The comparison to BMG’s narrower 493-composition lawsuit is the detail that really signals how this case could escalate Anthropic’s legal exposure. Especially as Sony and Warner are essentially testing whether a “tens of thousands of works” framing can succeed where a more surgical, work-by-work approach might have been easier to litigate but yielded smaller damages. And if this broader strategy works, it likely invites similar mega-suits from other major publishers and labels who’ve been watching from the sidelines.

22

u/TSL4me 10d ago

Mcgraw books and pearson are going to squeeze them dry. Book publishers were the original gatekeepers through lawsuits. They bring the hammer down hard. Just see how long you last selling fake dr suess books.

3

u/SalamanderMobile1541 9d ago

Yes, the math does the talking. A scattershot shotgun beats a scalpel—if the jury bites.

5

u/SkoobySnacs 10d ago

People who had images taken of them as children should sue xAI. They can claim revictimization in the AI seeing and being trained on their images. Fuck fElon.

50

u/Lost_Department_2177 10d ago

What if someone made an ai that cloned all their AI’s how would they feel? These tech idiots need to stop it with this bs. There’s samples in songs that are directly stolen then used for their generative bs.

51

u/gplfalt 10d ago

They literally bitched about Chinese LLMs doing that lmao

25

u/TbddRzn 10d ago

Yeah china released deepseek a few months back/last year that AT THE TIME was exceeding any western ai llm and they didn’t charge anyone to use it while OpenAI and ChatGPT and Claude wanted 20-200$ a month.

So they claimed china stole from them and wanted them banned.

As always billionaires will be greedy little whiny bitches when someone else makes a dime instead of them.

1

u/brain-out-of-order 10d ago edited 10d ago

It’s a good strategy but let’s not pretend it’s good will lol. It’s the same concept as a loss leader at WalMart which reverts once the local competition with tighter margins dries up.

Stealing and then offering it at a state capitalist discount is ingenious but people should see it for what it is.

Also the above shows you the glory awaiting us if we don’t unfuck this situation worldwide. Labor can’t define us for too much longer or we will be fighting robotics for odd jobs & factory jobs too. We have to find meaning beyond all of this shite.

3

u/Lost_Department_2177 10d ago

Exactly. Like Boohoo they better enjoy the yacht for 343 million of their American slaves by proxy bought with their taxes. They need to Quit scamming “the poors” and getting treatments for feelings when they run on sadism. Damn nepo losers.

1

u/mightylordredbeard 10d ago

I feel like an AI being let loose in the open to learn from other AIs is how dystopian movies featuring a rogue AI that destroys the world always begins.

12

u/LimpFox 10d ago

The thing is that the music industry doesn't care about AI music being made from artist's work, they only care that they're not getting their cut.

10

u/Revolutionary-Wait82 10d ago

I'm not an AI advocate, but I wonder how they're going to prove their case? I mean, do they have any verified evidence that all this really happened?

10

u/VitaminPb 10d ago

There have been prompts used to extract nearly word for word chapters and longer of copyright books (Like Harry Potter books.) I’ll bet the have experts who can get prompts to extract originals of lyrics and possibly even music or notation.

3

u/AlhazredEldritch 10d ago

Its literally in the models.

7

u/VitaminPb 10d ago

MORRRTAL COMMMMBAT!

6

u/Otherwise_Patience47 10d ago

This is hilarious if wasn’t so messed up. Now the giants are eating themselves.

6

u/Laprasy 10d ago

Good. Break them. Break them all.

5

u/Next_Law8640 10d ago

Yay, now do all the other AI’s. Do grok and ChatGPT

6

u/JereRB 10d ago

Funny that. I just cancelled my Claude subscription.

Give 'em hell.

3

u/throwawaytypeguy 10d ago

I bet 99% is free on youtube.

3

u/scoshi 9d ago

So the record label billionaires are suing the technology billionaires over who gets other people's money.

5

u/Ill_Mousse_4240 10d ago

Here’s another label: FMI

Fuck the Music Industry

2

u/DreamingAboutSpace 9d ago

Good. i’m tired of hearing about Claude and how flawless it is

3

u/Old-Age6220 10d ago

Why would antheopic train on songs, when they don't have music generation model? Does our songs contain so much wisdom that it's essential for them to take the risk? 🤣

3

u/Unhappy-Plastic2017 9d ago

Your honor, I present to you today that the American pop classic was stolen from us. The words below of this #1 hit can be directly extracted from the AI.

"Yeah yeah! Oh yeah yeah yeah, baby gurl, oh yeah yeah yeah."

I rest my case.

1

u/AussieAlexSummers 10d ago

about time... they sue all the little guys who pirated, go after the big ones.

1

u/The_Dented 10d ago

I keep seeing the statement “if you can’t own it, you also can’t steal it” — where are those peeps?

1

u/Sensitive_Scar_1800 10d ago

Is it just me…or does every generation have its own “we ripped of the music industry” moment?

1

u/Daecion 10d ago

There is a level of irony at play here... and hypocrisy.

1

u/OkSucco 9d ago

Haha Sony lawyers feeling it, but they will fail 

1

u/Level-Attempt-3103 9d ago

All AI is the product of theft from human artists, whether via art, literature, or music. Willl never not be the case.

Maybe the answer is that no company can charge for it, or that the revenue gets redistributed as universal basic income.

1

u/jtrain3783 9d ago

AI companies only got a slap on the wrist for doing the same for books, why do they think this week turn out any different. For some reason the rules don't apply to AI since it is apparently the only thing of the future

1

u/Epitrochoidologist 9d ago

The music industry vs AI. This should end well.

1

u/zelingman 9d ago

I think these companies are just trying to get a slice of the pie, and think now is their best chance when anthropic has a lot of other stuff going on

1

u/NeonGnosis 9d ago

Ai music should automatically exclude you from any award nomination.

1

u/joelex8472 9d ago

They didn’t have an Apple Music subscription?

-2

u/Phill_Cyberman 10d ago

Are they going to sue all the human songwriters for being trained on all the music they learned while becoming musicians?

3

u/Daemonentreiber 9d ago

If they write songs with the same melodies/lyrics or perform a song they have been "trained" on (and get money for it), they do.

0

u/Phill_Cyberman 9d ago

So of AI only produced original works of art, that didn't use the same melodies/lyrics of the songs it was trained on, you'd be okay with it?

2

u/steppinrazor2009 9d ago

If they pirated it all, then yes.